Three Engineers Who Made Facebook Something 500 Million People Love Just Quit

Here's a suprise: a Facebook
engineer named Ruchi Sanghvi is quitting the company.

Ruchi played a big role in making Facebook the Internet giant it
is today. On September 5, 2006, she wrote a blog post to users
titled Facebook Gets
a Facelift.

The post explained the launch of Facebook's News Feed, the
feature that made it so users could see all the changes their
friends had made to their profiles in one stream.

You know the rest of the story. Almost immediately, Facebook
users started screaming that the feature was a stalking tool.
They started forming protest groups. But they did all their
screaming and group-forming using the new feature. And soon they
were hooked.

The launch of the Facebook News Feed was a huge moment in the
history of Facebook and the Internet.

It put Facebook's ever-changing, constantly updating
user-generated content front and center – and turned it into a
monthly addiction for more than 500 million people.

It also created a central hub for Facebook to sell ads against.
Today, those ads will make up the vast majority of Facebook's
$1.5 billion to $2 billion 2010 revenues.

Inside Facebook
reports that Ruchi's isn't the only recent departure by a
crucial early Facebook employee. Others include Aaron
Sittig, who co-authored Facebook's patent on
tagging digital media, and Chris Putnam, who helped
make Facebook the far-and-away most popular photo site on the
Internet.